The documentation and conservation of African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes
Professor Heinz Rüther Rahim S. Rajan Aluka Initiative, JSTOR
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This is a joint presentation by Professor Heinz Rüther at the University of Cape Town and Aluka regarding a non‐profit digital library of cultural heritage sites and landscapes. Professor Heinz Rüther was unable to attend SAfA. The following presentation was delivered on September 8, 2008 by Rahim S. Rajan, Collection Development Manager of JSTOR’s Aluka Initiative as part of a panel titled “Which Pasts for What Future? Political, Ethical, and Scientific Dimensions of Salvage Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Management in Africa.”
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Outline
What is Aluka? Aluka Today Why Aluka is at SAfA! The African Cultural Heritage Sites & Landscapes digital library Examples of content in the digital library
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An outline of our presentation and paper. A special thanks to Cornelia Kleinitz and Claudia Näser for inviting Professor Rüther and I to speak and participate in this panel.
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Aluka’s Mission and History
Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa.
In July 2008, Aluka became an initiative of JSTOR (www.jstor.org).
JSTOR is a not–for–profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content in a trusted digital archive. JSTOR aims to preserve a record of scholarship for posterity and to advance research and teaching in cost–effective ways.
JSTOR’s scholarly archive includes over 1,000 academic journals. It is available to more than 5,000 institutions in ~130 nations.
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Aluka was founded in 2004 with major support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka Harbors, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and more recently, the Arcadia Trust. Until July of 2008, Aluka was an incubated entity within Ithaka. As a non‐profit organization, our mission is to build a scholarly resource from and about Africa. We are an international and collaborative initiative. We work with a wide range of institutions and individuals.
In July 2008, Aluka became an initiative within JSTOR (www.jstor.org). JSTOR is a not‐for‐ profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content in a trusted digital archive. JSTOR was founded in 1995, also by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. JSTOR is committed to furthering the work of Aluka and supports Aluka’s mission to build an online digital library from and about Africa. Working together, we are confident that we can better serve the needs of libraries, scholars, research institutions, and publishers.
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An online platform for sharing knowledge
• Aluka has 114 institutional and individual contributors and partners from ~31 countries (including 16 African countries)
• Three “content areas” or thematic collections: African Plants, Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, and African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes
• Wide range of materials relating to numerous different disciplines (archaeology, history, anthropology, botany, ecology, political science, geomatics, and geography)
• Folksonomies (tags, like flickr); ability for scholars and students to create and share curated materials via My Aluka
• A variety of high resolution viewing and measuring tools; the site is available in French, Portuguese, and English
• Multiple formats of data and viewing options to account for differences in global bandwidth environments (i.e., simple text, low and hi res pdf, flash viewers)
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The database has numerous important features which are all described above. It is an interdisciplinary digital library with three large thematic collections. Each of these three content areas has been supported by grant funds. It is important to emphasize that the database was engineered to perform even in low bandwidth environments (i.e., much of Africa). Users are therefore provided with numerous options in the format and resolution of the object in the database. Opening a high resolution object is the discretion of the user; it is not the default option. There are also tools in the database that promote the sharing of information such as tagging. With the “My Aluka” feature, users can essentially ‘curate’ Aluka and save their ‘favorite’ digital objects from the database in a folder only accessible to the user.
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Aluka Today: Community driven growth
• Who is our intended audience? Faculty, researchers, and students around the world Heritage site managers and conservators (NGO’s and governments) Libraries, archives, museums, public libraries
• Current participation and access model: Free access to academic and research institutions in Africa; modest participation fees elsewhere (350+ participating institutions worldwide from 40 nations) Majority of our core operating costs are grant or subscription funded 2 million accesses to www.aluka.org since January 2008 ~400,000 individual visits to Aluka since January 2008
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Aluka’s audience is the same group of scholars and students affiliated to or members of SAfA. We also believe that the resource will be of interest to governments and NGO’s, public libraries, and museums around the world that have an interest in Africa’s cultural, biological, and historical past.
Aluka is a freely available resource in Africa. It is available at all non‐profit, academic, research, and government institutions. It is also available to secondary schools in Africa at no charge. Institutions in Africa need only register with Aluka by visiting the Aluka website (www.aluka.org). Academic and research institutions located outside of Africa can participate in Aluka by paying a modest subscription fee. Approximately 20% of our accesses come from Africa.
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Aluka Today: Community driven growth
• Why are we at SAfA? Inform you about the existence of this online resource Provide a brief introduction to the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes database Solicit feedback and answer questions: how can we make the database even more comprehensive? Which scholarly literature and heritage sites and landscapes should we pursue in the future? Encourage you to contribute content or partner with Aluka – help grow the digital library Help raise awareness about this young, international, non-profit initiative
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This is Aluka’s first participation in SAfA. We are very grateful to SAfA for the hospitality that they have shown us. We are here to solicit feedback, suggestions, and recommendations on how to improve the digital library and how to gain more participation and input from SAfA members and our colleagues.
We are also here to solicit intellectual contributions to the database. Which heritage sites in Africa should we pursue to document? Which image or archaeological collections should we seek to partner with and attempt to include in the database? We truly see this project as a collaborative initiative and we depend on the feedback and suggestions of the scholarly community to improve the quality of this scholarly resource.
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The African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes digital library
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We will now turn our attention to one of the three thematic areas within Aluka – the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes digital library.
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Professor Heinz Rüther
Heinz Rüther is a Fellow of the University of Cape Town, a Fellow of the South African Academy of Engineers, a Member of the South African Academy of Science.
Prof. Rüther is a past Council member of the International Society for Photo- grammetry and Remote Sensing , present Chair of the Financial Commission of ISPRS and Vice President of the African Association for Remote Sensing of Environment.
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Professor Heinz Rüther approached the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2005 with a proposal to document African Cultural Heritage sites using advanced technology methods such as laser scanning, GIS, photogrammetry, etc. At that time, the Mellon Foundation had just launched the creation of Aluka – a digital library from and about Africa. For obvious reasons, Professor Rüther’s interest in preserving and documenting African patrimony and Aluka’s efforts to build a technology platform to host intellectual content from and about Africa complimented each other. Since then, Aluka and Professor Heinz Rüther have collaborated to build the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes page.
Professor Heinz Rüther and his team at the University of Cape Town lead the spatial and visual documentation of heritage sites in Africa. Staff at Aluka work with academic advisors and other scholars to select additional ‘contextual’ materials such as archival collections, published or unpublished research, secondary sources, image archives, etc. that will complement the spatial and visual data created by Professor Rüther and his team.
8 Aluka’sAluka’s HeritageHeritage PartnersPartners
UniversitàUniversità degli degli StudiStudi didi UniversityUniversity ofof CapeCape TownTown NapoliNapoli ‘l’‘l’ Orientale’ Orientale’ SmithsonianSmithsonian LibrariesLibraries RockRock ArtArt ResearchResearch InstituteInstitute Trust for African Rock Trust for African Rock TrustTrust forfor AfricanAfrican RockRock ArtArt ArtArt NorthwesternNorthwestern UniversityUniversity BritishBritish InstituteInstitute inin EasternEastern SAVAMA-DCISAVAMA-DCI AfricaAfrica
99SAfASAfA 2008 2008 -- African African CulturalCultural Heritage Heritage Sites Sites and and Landscapes Landscapes
Aluka has also partnered and worked with a diverse array of organizations both in Africa and elsewhere to build the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes database. We have also sought formal permissions from the relevant African governments and countries in which we have documented sites.
Below is a list of partners that have assisted Aluka in building the collections available in the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes database:
The University of Cape Town (South Africa) Rock Art Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) Trust for African Rock Art (Kenya) Università degli di Studi Napoli L’Orientale (Italy) British Institute in Eastern Africa (Kenya) Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University (USA) SAVAMA‐DCI (Mali) Carol Beckwith & Angela Fisher (United Kingdom) Smithsonian Institution Libraries & National Museum of African Art (USA) NUAMPS ‐ Northwestern University Advanced Media Production Studio (USA)
As a relatively new and young initiative, we continue to seek partnerships and collaborations with other institutions and individual scholars and we kindly request that interested institutions or scholars contact us.
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Technologies used
Aerial & close range digital photogrammetry Satellite imagery, remote sensing and image processing Laser scanning Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and CAD Computer visualisations XML Database Conventional surveying methods
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The team at the University of Cape Town utilizes a variety of advanced technology methods. Each site is documented via an assortment of technologies based on the conditions on the ground and the features of the site or landscape.
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This image was taken by a member of Professor Rüther’s team during the spatial documentation of the Djingerayber Mosque in Timbuktu, Mali.
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Prof. Heinz Rüther, Professor of Geomatics at UCT
Prof. Rüther and his team have documented numerous heritage sites across Africa including:
Kilwa Kisiwani Five rock art caves in the Cederberg Lamu Great Zimbabwe Timbuktu Djenné Elmina Rock hewn churches of Lalibela Axum Asante Temples Engaruka cultural landscape Mapungubwe cultural landscape Meroe (expected 2009)
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A list of African heritage sites and landscapes that are or will be included in the Aluka digital library. Those shaded grey are currently not available on the site, but will be released as soon as the data processing is completed and received by Aluka. We also seek input and recommendations from SAfA members and leading scholars as to which sites should be documented in the future. We anticipate documenting an additional 10‐15 sites in the next 3 years – i.e., between 2008 ‐ 2011.
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Downloadable 3D Models of the Sites
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This is a 3D model of Bet Emanuel at Lalibela, located in northern Ethiopia. 3D models of the cultural heritage sites are available for download and viewing at www.aluka.org.
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3D Models of the Sites
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This is a close up view of one of the 3D models – a model of the Djingerayber Mosque in Timbuktu, Mali. Note the texture and slope of the ground and earthen walls.
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Ground plans of the Sites (metrically accurate)
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This is a ground plan, generated from the 3D laser scan model. The ground plans are metrically accurate and also available for viewing and download at www.aluka.org.
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Facades and ground plans
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This is a front view of the laser scan. It is metrically accurate to about 2 cm. These views of the heritage sites are available for viewing and download at www.aluka.org.
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Downloadable GIS data sets for each site
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A GIS is created by the University of Cape Town team for each heritage site that is documented.
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Quicktime movies of “virtual” sites – Napoli Collection
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Another example of the diverse content in the African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes digital library, this Quicktime movie was created by a team of archaeologists at the Università degli di Studi Napoli L’Orientale.
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Image collections and videos of the sites and landscapes
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Professor Heinz Rüther’s team also acquires images and video footage for each of the digital heritage site. In addition to this data, Aluka has also sought to digitize various image collections that would complement the materials already in the database including Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith’s fascinating and important image collection of African peoples and communities.
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Archival and unpublished research and documentation
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Examples of the visual resources from prior excavations available for viewing and download at www.aluka.org.
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African Rock Art – image archive covering 15 nations
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In partnership with the Trust for African Rock Art and the Rock Art Research Institute, Aluka’s African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes digital library includes a large collection of digital images of Africa’s unique and diverse rock art. These images have been digitized in South Africa and Kenya by both organizations.
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Dissertations
“A detailed assessment of Elmina Fort in 1979 within the context of Ghana's emerging conservation movement at that time. It also describes the nearby town of Elmina, and the use of the fort at the time. It concludes with recommendations on how the fort can be conserved and used in the future.”
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Aluka’s African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes digital library includes digital version of doctoral thesis and dissertations. These dissertations were recommended by various scholars and are available for viewing and download at www.aluka.org. We hope SAfA members and scholars will consider depositing digital copies of their research dissertations in Aluka.
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Digitized books and articles:
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As part of the contextual materials in the digital library, we receive numerous recommendations from scholars regarding which monographs, secondary sources, and other literature that should be digitized and included in the database. All of these books and scholarly articles are full‐text searchable and downloadable in high and low resolution PDF formats. The database includes a variety of sophisticated viewing tools such as a book viewer. Users can also ‘save’ these individual books in their “My Aluka” folder for future reference or to share in a virtual bibliography.
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Thank you. Please contribute and help build this vital educational resource. See a demo of Aluka while you’re at SAfA. www.aluka.org
[email protected] [email protected]
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Please contact us with questions or if you have any suggestions or feedback. We look forward to working with the members of SAfA and helping to build this important and unique digital library. Thank You.
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